2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 20th

Blood & Donuts (1995) [Criterion]

It was almost a rewatch of Prince of Darkness tonight, but for some reason it wound up being a watch of another movie streaming on Criterion this month, the Canadian indie, Blood & Donuts.  Maybe it was the Jarmuschian title.  Maybe it was the synopsis mentioning the appearance of a famous cinematic Canadian as an actor: one David Cronenberg.  Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for a canister of liquid evil in a church basement.

It was a pleasant surprise, anyway, at least for the first two-thirds or so.  Honestly, it collapses in the last third, deliberate comic absurdities giving way to clumsy movie trope absurdities.  Things happen to fill out the plot, other things happen to fix the ending a certain way that don't make a lot of sense except they need to happen to fix the ending a certain way.  Characters start losing their coherence and whatever consistency they might have had for plot reasons.  But the first two-thirds are charming.  One wonders if it was an influence on What We Do In The Shadows, not because Blood & Donuts is anything like a mockumentary but simply because it has a certain kind of offbeat, low-fi vibe that WWDITS shares.  And vampires, of course.

Boya (Gordon Currie) is an immortal lord of the undead who got bummed out by the Moon landing and wrapped himself in a bag for nearly three decades.  He's accidentally awakened and blunders around making friends with a lowlife misfit cab driver and a donut shop waitress, and helps the former with his organized crime problems.  A jealous, jilted ex shows up to cause problems and David Cronenberg is a gangster.  Because of the lack of budget, it's one of those movies where the sets are huge and empty, since there's not really enough money for verisimilitude in making hotel rooms and donut shops look like hotel rooms and donut shops, nor enough money to hire very many extras to make the sets look lived in.  But it's cute.  It gets a long way on charm.

It's also got a surprisingly kicking soundtrack, or maybe I'm just a sucker for any vampire movie that licenses Concrete Blonde's "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)", which remains the best vampire song ever written (suck it, Gordon Sumner).  ("Dragula" is boss but it's about a vampire's car, not the vampire, so don't even try it.)

If I were writing for the old AV Club before it kinda went to crap, I'd probably give this one a C+ that would be a B- anywhere else.  Two and a half stars out of four.  I'm being a little tough on it, probably.  If you have access to it and want to turn your brain down to Medium, Medium-Low, I think it's enjoyable enough.  The cast carries it off reasonably well.  But man, the last third is just dumb, albeit inoffensively dumb.  No regrets.